Where is the ruler in the city? Corporeal Invisibility and Architectural Visibility in the Mausoleum of al-Ṣāliḥ Najm al-Dīn Ayyūb By Emily Fu In the accounts of al-Maqrīzī, who wrote during the Mamluk era (1250-1517 C.E., AH 648-923), he described what happened to the palace area, known as Bayn al-Qasrayn, after Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s (r. 1174-1193 C.E., AH 569-588) rise to power. Amīrs who were occupying the area set up their residences in the halls and pavilions, sold inventory, founded a hospital, and opened the area to wider circles of the population— all of these indicated that there was no plan to keep up the former palatial associations of the area.1 However, by the time of alṢāliḥ Ayyūb (r.1240-1249 C.E., AH 637-646), Ibn Saʿīd al-Maghribī’s report gave the impression of “narrow, dark alleys full of dust and smell, against which the wide space of Bayn al-Qaṣrayn appeared like a splendid array of royal buildings.”2 Eventually this street will come to be lined with seven royal mausoleum complexes, with al -Ṣāliḥ’s being the first.
What accounts for this transformation and the revival of the former place “between the two palaces”? Shajarat al-Durr chose to erect her late-husband’s mausoleum on this site — setting off a chain of Mamluk building projects on this central ceremonial passageway. Beginning with the mausoleum of al-Ṣāliḥ, this building type, the madrasa-mausoleum, and the site of Bayn alQaṣrayn, came to be the choice vehicle and locale for sultans to proclaim their presence in the city. Like any other ruler before or after her, Shajarat al-Durr was aware of architecture’s representational function and the ways in which it could indicate the importance of the patron. After a series of reigns by sultans pulled away from the city by the forces of war, and during the unusual rule of a woman from within the confines of the citadel, a new emphasis on tomb building emerged in the late-Ayyubid period. The void left by the absence of the sultan’s physical body came to be replaced by heightened visual and aural prominence. The mausoleum commissioned by Shajarat al-Durr represents a turning point, away from the tradition of the Fatimid forer-
-unners and towards the later developments of Mamluk architecture — marked by a demand for highly visible domes, visual access, the attention of passersby on the street, and a highly sophisticated aural and epigraphic system, which fashioned the public image of the ruler. Al-Ṣāliḥ Najm al-Dīn Ayyūb constructed his madrasa on the site of the former Fatimid eastern palace two years into his rule. After Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s rise to power, the Fatimids were removed, and Abbasid rule was restored along with Sunnī orthodoxy. As Creswell’s reconstruction shows, the plan of two iwans (rectangular vaulted halls) on the shorter eastern and western sides connected by cells and assembled around a courtyard are assumed to be mirrored on the southern half of the madrasa.3 The madrasa provided an iwan for each of the four Sunnī schools of law. During Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s rule, Bayn al-Qaṣrayn was possibly intentionally neglected to send the message that the heretical grounds upon which the Fatimids based their rule were justly decaying. On this basis, al-Ṣāliḥ’s choice to erect his madrasa on the site could have been a means of showcasing the pious monument that is the product of a “just ruler” taking possession of the royal grounds of an illegitimate dynasty. However, as Lorenz Korn points out, by the time the madrasa was erected, seven decades after the fall of the Fatimids, it was probably no longer conceived as an anti-Fatimid statement.4 If we are to conceive of al-Ṣāliḥ’s structure as more than just a reactionary measure against Fatimid traditions, then what does the madrasa-mausoleum say about itself? Looking beyond the city walls, the madrasa-mausoleum complex of imam al-Shāfiʿī’s dome has a comparable configuration and a similar emphasis on visibility, both from inside and outside the complex. Inside the complex, someone facing the qibla wall of the madrasa connected to the mausoleum would have had direct visual access to the cenotaph (the empty tomb).5 The complex was also highly visible from the citadel, as the cemetery was relatively empty at the time of its construction, and it was across from a spacious maydān (public square).6 There is little evidence of the original shape of the dome of the mausoleum, however, the 15th-century Mamluk reconstruction was likely modelled on the pointed profile of al-Ṣāliḥ’s dome, revealing a connection between the two structures that persisted two centuries later.7 Additionally, the Imam 21
